A Haughty Rant Against Argentina’s National Drink

Cinthia Solange Dhers is a 53-year-old surgeon who recently bought an apartment in Nordelta, a gated community in one of the most upscale areas of Buenos Aires. But the neighborhood didn’t live up to her high standards, and she shared her disappointment with a friend in a voice message that ended up online.

She complained in the message that her neighbors talked too loudly and didn’t put their dogs on leashes. They did not share her “moral aesthetics.” She did not expect to find “beasts, with no education, who yell and drink mate like they would at Bristol beach in Mar del Plata.”

It was Dr. Dhers’s reference to her new neighbors’ mate-drinking habits that touched a nerve. Dripping with snobbery, the rant lit up social media and prompted a cascade of news articles and talk-show discussions about the sacred place of mate (pronounced MAH-teh) in Argentine society. Millions of Argentines listened to the recording, mocked it and condemned it. There were calls for mate-drinking protests in Nordelta and Mar del Plata.

Mate is an infusion made from a leaf called yerba mate. Small amounts of hot water are poured into a gourd stuffed with the leaves and sipped out with a metal straw. It’s a bitter caffeinated beverage — similar, perhaps, to Japanese green tea — that is said to help regulate digestion. Many people would call it Argentina’s national drink.

Dr. Dhers’s haughty rant tapped into tensions around Argentina’s deep economic divide. At least one in four Argentines live below the poverty line. Unemployment and income inequality are high. Yet the wealthy seem to be doing just fine.

South Americans have been sharing gourds of mate for thousands of years. When the Spanish arrived, the Guaraní natives — its original drinkers, who have lived mostly in what is now Paraguay — were forced to cultivate the leaves on plantations run by Jesuit priests. It spread throughout the region in Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and the lower areas of Brazil.

In our passion for mate, however, we conveniently ignore the people from Misiones Province in Argentina, where some 60 percent of mate leaves are cultivated, about 770,000 tons a year. The tareferos, as those who work on the fields are called, often start working at the age of 4. They don’t go to school. Most often they live in shacks with no running water or bathroom. They work 12-hour shifts under the sun and die young.

Half a century ago, only the urban poor and people in the countryside would consume mate. In “Todo por la Patria,” a novel set in the 1930s, a self-proclaimed Argentine aristocrat says that mate “is a plague, an authentic plague,” adding: “And they intend to make out of this concoction our national beverage. For God’s sake! Imagine what sort of homeland we’re making with this drink.”

Today the drink is found in every household, every office, every school. When I started out as a journalist 40 years ago, most reporters kept a bottle of gin in their desk drawer. Now, instead of alcohol, journalists keep nearby a stash of yerba mate leaves, a gourd, the metal straw and a thermos full of hot water.

Well-off people embraced mate as part of a trend of the wealthy appropriating popular habits of lower- and middle-class Argentines. Thirty years ago, wealthy people didn’t get excited about soccer. They didn’t dance the cumbia. Drinking mate would have been outlandish in wealthy social circles.

The difference now, like with so many other things, is that the rich drink it in private, the poor in public.

Globalization has resulted in the most significant cultural homogenization in history. All over the world, we hear the same music, drink the same fizzy waters and eat the same soft buns filled with minced meat. There are only a handful of foods and customs that remain local. That’s why it’s so extraordinary that a drink from a little tribe along the Paraná River persists. That’s why the passion for mate is so deep, as Dr. Dhers discovered.

It’s a bitter drink that no one else drinks, a sharing ritual that we don’t share with outsiders. We like to suck on a little metal rod so that the water we have poured into a little hollow gourd comes back flavored with the brittle leaves.

Mate defies the logic of capitalism: It hasn’t grown significantly in popularity around the world, but it doesn’t perish. It has all the elements a product needs to become a myth: an aboriginal history, a natural and distant origin, organic properties, mystery and a unique flavor. But people have tried to market it elsewhere, and it has never taken off. Yet mate continues to thrive in the places where it’s from.

The bitterness of its leaves, the warm straw, the sucking noises, the sharing, make it an intimate experience. It’s what we miss the most when we are away from home. There’s nothing as comforting for an Argentine abroad as running into someone who will share some mate.

Argentines have put up with so much, we always have, but we won’t stand for a pretentious person looking down on mate.

Martín Caparrós, an author and journalist in Madrid, is a regular contributor to The New York Times en Español. This essay was translated from the Spanish by Catalina Lobo-Guerrero.